Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Order at Tin House or Amazon now!“[A] brilliant, wildly imaginative mediation on grief and loss and coping with being human and then not being at all.”- NYLON“[A] collection that features a bravely vulnerable beating heart hidden beneath layers of irony and clever misdirection. Stone is the child of her muses, Sexton and Emily Dickinson, and it is an odd but delightful union.”- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review“Fantastically unsettling and sparks a serious meditation on grief and family, from a distinctly feminine perspective. . . . [Stone] populates her poems with characters that range from Emily Dickinson to her grandmother, and the result is the feeling that we are witnessing a soul’s intimate reckoning with life. Many poets have attempted to imagine the afterlife, and Stone’s addition to the tradition disrupts it in the best way.”- The Paris Review, Staff Pick“Meditative and darkly entertaining, vivid and visceral, a little bit out-of-control, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is filled with tired bodies, bodies with scars, other women poets, and members of Stone’s own family ― including a grandmother who herself is being grieved. This is a poetry collection like few you’ll come across.”- Bustle“Bianca Stone’s lyricism outright rejects the Wordsworthian definition, 'emotion recollected in tranquility'; there is nothing tranquil about these poems or the state in which they were written. Grief, loss, and disappointment are transferred to a landscape of wild objects and associations. We are propelled along by abrupt changes in perspective and dimension. Bianca Stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation’s emerging pathology and sensibility.”- John Ashbery

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

1. MONK BOOKS.My press, Monk Books, is just killing it lately (big big thanx to my boo/editor, Ben Pease)... see an interview on Entropy Magazine here! We have a brand new (debut) full-length collection of poetry by rockstar, Christine Kanownik, KING OF PAIN and the inaugural issue Ruth Stone Reader is coming out soon (available for AWP in a week??!!! TABLE 1741), featuring:2. THESE POEMS BY Ana Božičević in BathHouse Journal."My brain is falling apartSo I’m allowed to talk."3. MACTAGGART JEWELRY4. These COLOR EMBEDDED GOLDEN SCEPTRE for a mere $62 are flooring me. Paige Taggart, as I've mentioned before, is an incredible poet and jeweler. There's nothing better than that, right? Be one of the crew and get your MacTaggart today. Period.5. SAMANTHA ZIGHELBOIM'S poems from "FAT SONNETS""The gradual disappearance of my face / is a kind of death."So Samantha is totally going there: those places that thrive in the shadows. The real shit. Shit that we many of us experience but have no outlet to discuss. And here she is, doing it in her beautiful, lyrical way that has made me so excited about her poems.Also, what strikes me about these is the SONNET form. Traditionally a love-poem form, there's a very different sort of lover being addressed in these sonnets, the more important lover, (but here, the most destructive lover): the body.While her poems are not consumed with complaining, they point out the physical reality of being overweight, of being an outsider in your own body, and the mental space taken up by this dichotomy is, if you've experienced it, devastating and complex, darkly hailing a bittersweet feeling for the body.How to write a love poem of something so complicated? So personal, and yet totally societal?) I've been very deeply interested in the idea of binging--drinking and eating--and I've found there's a huge amount of love for food/drink within myself, but also so much anger and hatred. Drinking/eating have been my lover who will never say No. Who will always be there. But at what cost? I think the sonnet form is perfect for this subject. The speaker in the poems explores tropes of dieting, and the reality of personal body image. The poems have so much wisdom in them.Here's two places to read these poems:The Fanzine Smoking Glue GunThe title "Imagine How Perfect You’ll Be When It’s Over" is so devastatingly astute and honest, especially with that "Exit Strategies" following it....

Thank gawwwdddd for Samantha and her amazing poems. Follow her work closely, this woman's amazing.

6. Oh yeah, Ben and I bought a caravan to live in, in Vermont....

I've already scoured Pinterest for rv ideas... and still I'm convinced I can outdo these peeps. I'm going to PIMP THIS RIDE so hard. Stay tuned for that... I'll be living in this in the mountains of VT with my geriatric cat and a while lot of weed, working on my next book of poetry.7. MY POEM: ONES WHO GOT AWAY WITH IT on Pinwheel. And THIS INTERVIEW (super short) on Washington Square.8. Lastly, this article about letting the bush go wild up to the belly button. Let's hope it sticks. HAPPY TRAIL 4EVA!

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Today is Saturday in Brooklyn and I just got back home from one of those afternoons that blows you full of holes and challenges you to keep it together.... You know those days? My new approach is to say to myself: Tomorrow will probably be just as crazy as today. So. Well. DEAL WITH IT.

Breaking your new iPhone screen to shit after insisting to your husband that you "don't need a fucking case, it's just a "racket?" is infuriating. 'Turns out there's no escaping the tyrannical phone company racketeering.... My "insurance" (that I was goaded into getting) for has a co-pay of $200 if you break your screen. I mean, IS THIS IS DEAL? No. Not really. Considering I could pay for a fixed screen for the price of half a year's insurance. It's about 100 for a new screen at Staples, and I can probably get it cheeper in midtown. So now I have a new stupid space-themed iPhone case and a glass of bourbon and I'm trying to move on. Not to mention my dear mother-in-law is in the hospital with cancer, and it just puts things into prospective. Suffering is suffering. The rest is just bullshit that happens.

[ Have you seen these tiny Bullet Bourbon's? PERFECT for the woman with moderation issues.]

England's Sick-Kick Books has just put out a new collection of poetry comics by people from all over the world, with an incredibly helpful introduction on the Poetry Comic form. Edited by Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone, this is a great one for beginners and collectors.

Days: 5 Weeks
Dates: 10/12–11/9
Location: Online
Level: All Levels
Genre(s): Poetry
POETRY COMICS: Each week I'll give inspiring readings and assignments. You don't have to be able to draw to take this class. You only need to be willing to try new things. And believe me, unless you have a serious disability, you will be able to do these assignments. What matters most is creative excitement, and a love of poetry. Because we'll be doing erasures, collage, ekphrastic, and video poems. And it will be amazing. Time is very flexible with the online classes.

ALTERNATIVE FORM: Similar to the PC workshop, except focus is solely on text. I love form, but find that traditional form alone is a bit tedious and produces mediocre work. Times allow for a new focus on form. We'll be looking at that here.

In this workshop we’ll explore alternative forms in poetry in response to weekly exercises. We’ll explore new uses of unusual forms such as ekphrasis, erasure, poetry comics, prose, video, pastiche and other forms. participants will be encouraged to bring in their own interests and personal skills, and collaboration is inevitable. Readings will include classic and contemporary works by Dara Wier, Lydia Barry, Matthew Zapruder, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Matthea Harvey, Syliva Plath, Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust and others. In addition, we’ll look at films, music and visual art from a range of sources, getting out of our comfort zones and challenging our notions of what a poem is.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

I've been reading a lot of Hours books, which are medieval poetry comics for rich people. Also, similarly seen as a sort of "lower-art," on the artists' part--compared to painting chapel walls, just as comics was seen for so long, on closer inspection, any idiot can see that this is complex, gorgeous and brilliant works of art. I love how in the Hours books the person for whom the book was being made, was often painted into the religious images. I feel a great kinship to these impulses.

The richer the blues, the more expensive it was.

How amazing to hand-paint an entire book for someone! And so tiny! I think I will make a series of hand-painted books. This reminds me of the awesome book "The Desert" that Jen Bervin made. It's like a modern-day erasure Book of Hours.

There's along tradition of illuminated manuscripts. The REN FARE dweeb in me is focusing on the medieval ones.

Why? Secret new book of poetry comics coming your way very soon.

I wish that it was as good at a Book of Hours, but it will be my sloppy version

of making each hour of the day a holy one. One filled with houses and teetering wine bottles.

In this class we will explore unconventional form in poetry in response to weekly exercises. There will be in-class and out of class writing and reading. The classroom will be formulated similarly to a poetry workshop where students read and respond on one another’s work, but we will focus more on production, exploration and imperfection. Our goal will be to push our poetry and (short) fiction into new realms. The forms we’ll explore are: new uses of ekphrastic, erasures, poetry comics, video, pastiche, and others. Students will be encouraged to bring in their interests and personal skills, and collaboration is inevitable.

This workshop takes place at Bowery Poetry Club on the following Sundays from 1-3 PM:

September 6th September 13th September 20th September 27th October 4th

Thursday, July 2, 2015

If you want to really go deep into the mysticism of making poetry comics, read this interview I did for the Georgia Review (which has a full 12 page poetry comic in their last issue, as well as the cover! So buy that shit here.)

EXCERPT:

LS: Everything you’ve just said fascinates me—I feel torn to take us in at least three directions. How did I miss the spirit of Frida Kahlo at work in your images? I want to come back to a discussion of self-representation and the representation of self-representation in the age of social media. I also want to discuss further the various inheritances at play in your work and the particular weight We Dust the Walls places on that subject matter, whether directly or obliquely, both in the image and the text.

But first I want to address the power of flatness in the images in We Dust the Walls and in early Renaissance painting. When I first saw your poetry comic, it reminded me of Piero della Francesca’s series of frescoes in Arezzo, The Legend of the True Cross, especially the battle scene he depicts in one of the larger panels. The image is realistic—you can see every leg of every horse and an emotional expression specific to each face—but something is indisputably off about its realism. The flat depiction reinforces a dreaminess that arises from the image witnessing more in a moment than any eye could ever naturally behold. We can’t stop time, but the image can and does so that we can see what we’re missing, which turns out to be almost everything—and therein lies its ability to leave us awestruck. Angelic Texting, the image on our Spring 2015 cover, produces a similar feeling in me. When I look at it, I feel as though it presents something radically holy about contemporary life that I’ve never before noticed.

So maybe there is, after all, a single concern common to the various conversations I would like to have with you—I think what I’m really curious about are the ways in which your work describes, enacts, and responds to time.

BS: The movement of time becomes more abstract in creative work because the creator is dictating the rules. And how powerful a thing that is: to dictate time. It’s like reading about the complex nature of the universe: once an astrophysicist begins explaining things, we realize that the rules in space are very different than those we seem to experience on earth. Sometimes we simply cannot comprehend the rules at all; our tiny idea of time is just a means of convenience, and I think art resists convenience. Once we lessen our grip on learned patterns of conceptualizing time, we start to see more around us.

Poetry offers a good opportunity to depart from routine temporal encounters and perceptions. A poem is very brief compared to most prose works. And yet, the poem demands a much slower approach . . . but not too slow.

Robert Pinsky says “the medium of poetry is a human body.” A poem’s meter is based on the body’s music, which—rooted in breathing and the sounds manipulated by means of our larynxes and our mouths—subconsciously dictates the pace at which the poem’s read. And poetry comics should be imbued with that same unique, physical musicality.

Moreover, comics are defined by what’s called sequential imaging. We see the comic as moving forward, telling a story, driving us to the end, but the poetry comic form can demand you to stop and inspect the intricacies of the image, while also taking in the meaning of the words. In other words, you’re being both propelled forward and stalled simultaneously. Discussing time reminds me of what John Keats famously called “negative capability,” how, as writers and readers of literature, we have to be capable of embracing uncertainty; there has to be mystery, things that are missing. In a poetry comic, there are so many things missing. You have the white space on the page, the “gutters,” as well as the subsequent connections our minds will make while seeing the image and reading the text—so much happens in those small spaces that demands time slow down.

All of this happens very subtly, powerfully. In experiencing art you might be taking in a lot of information, trying to make sense of it, but while doing so there is room for awe and curiosity.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

This summer and fall I will be teaching two workshops on Experimental Form in Poetry. We're going to have an amazing time and write tons of new stuff. Information on both classes is below.

1. BROOKLYN POETS

LEVEL II WORKSHOP: ALTERNATIVE FORMS
In this workshop we’ll explore alternative forms in poetry in response to weekly exercises. There will be in-class and out-of-class reading and writing as we try to push our poetry into new realms, not being afraid of imperfection or venturing into the unknown. We’ll explore new uses of ekphrasis, erasure, poetry comics, prose, video, pastiche and other forms. Students will be encouraged to bring in their own interests and personal skills, and collaboration is inevitable. Readings will include classic and contemporary works by Dara Wier, Lydia Barry, Matthew Zapruder, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Matthea Harvey, Syliva Plath, Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust and others. In addition, we’ll look at films, music and visual art from a range of sources, getting out of our comfort zones and challenging our notions of what a poem is.

In this class we will explore unconventional form in poetry in response to weekly exercises. There will be in-class and out of class writing and reading. The classroom will be formulated similarly to a poetry workshop where students read and respond on one another’s work, but we will focus more on production, exploration and imperfection. Our goal will be to push our poetry and (short) fiction into new realms. The forms we’ll explore are: new uses of ekphrastic, erasures, poetry comics, video, pastiche, and others. Students will be encouraged to bring in their interests and personal skills, and collaboration is inevitable.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Super awesome that Poetry Magazine is now open to "visual poetry" and I encourage all you experimental poets to submit to them! On my end, super happy to have four poetry comics in there this month, alongside some amazing poets! SEE THEM ALL ONLINE!!